When I look at the scale of the apparatus I know what it reads. Those absurdly delicate, hopelessly inaccessible, global correlations obviously vanish when they connect up with me. Whether this is because consciousness is beyond the range of phenomena that quantum mechanics is capable of dealing with, or because it has infinitely many degrees of freedom or special super selection rules of its own, I would not presume to guess. But this is a puzzle about consciousness that should not (...) get mixed up with efforts to understand quantum mechanics as a theory of subsystem correlations in the nonconscious world. ( David Mermin 1998). (shrink)

Physicalism, a topic that has been central to philosophy of mind and metaphysics in recent years, is the philosophical view that everything in the space-time world is ultimately physical. The physicalist will claim that all facts about the mind and the mental are physical facts and deny the existence of mental events and state insofar as these are thought of as independent of physical things, events and states. This collection of new essays offers a series of 'state-of-the-art' perspectives on this (...) important doctrine and brings new depth and breadth to the philosophical debate. A group of distinguished philosophers, comprising both physicalists and their critics, consider a wide range of issues including the historical genesis and present justification of physicalism, its metaphysical presuppositions and methodological role, its implications for mental causation, and the account it provides of consciousness. (shrink)

The appeal of materialism lies precisely in this, in its claim to be natural metaphysics within the bounds of science. That a doctrine which promises to gratify our ambition (to know the noumenal) and our caution (not to be unscientific) should have great appeal is hardly something to be wondered at. (Putnam (1983), p.210) Materialism says that all facts, in particular all mental facts, obtain in virtue of the spatio- temporal distribution, and properties, of matter. It was, as Putnam says, (...) “metaphysics within the bounds of science”, but only so long as science was thought to say that the world is made out of matter.1 In this century physicists have learned that there is more in the world than matter and, in any case, matter isn’t quite what it seemed to be. For this reason many philosophers who think that metaphysics should be informed by science advocate physicalism in place of materialism. Physicalism claims that all facts obtain in virtue of the distribution of the fundamental entities and properties –whatever they turn out to be- of completed fundamental physics. Later I will discuss a more precise formulation. But not all contemporary philosophers embrace physicalism. Some- and though a minority not a small or un-influential one- think that physicalism is rather the metaphysics for an unjustified scientism; i.e. it is scientistic metaphysics. Those among them that think that physicalism can be clearly formulated think that it characterizes a. (shrink)

‘Wrongful life’ torts raise a number of interesting and perplexing philosophical issues. In a suit for ‘wrongful life’, the plaintiff (usually an infant) brings an action (usually against a physician) claiming that some negligent action has caused the plaintiff's life, say by not informing the parents of the likely prospect that their child would be born with severe defects. The most perplexing feature of this is that the plaintiff is claiming that he would have been better off if he had (...) never been born. A number of arguments have appeared which purport to show that ‘wrongful life’ claims should not be allowed, either because it is senseless to claim that one would be better off if one had not existed or that it is impossible to assess the extent to which someone has been damaged by being brought into existence. In our paper we rebut these arguments and suggest a procedure for determining damages in ‘wrongful life cases’. (shrink)

torts raise a number of interesting and perplexing philosophical issues. In a suit for ‘wrongful life’, the plaintiff (usually an infant) brings an action (usually against a physician) claiming that some negligent action has caused the plaintiff's life, say by not informing the parents of the likely prospect that their child would be born with severe defects. The most perplexing feature of this is that the plaintiff is claiming that he would have been better off if he had never been (...) born. A number of arguments have appeared which purport to show that ‘wrongful life’ claims should not be allowed, either because it is senseless to claim that one would be better off if one had not existed or that it is impossible to assess the extent to which someone has been damaged by being brought into existence. In our paper we rebut these arguments and suggest a procedure for determining damages in ‘wrongful life cases’. Keywords: ‘wrongful life’, ‘wrongful birth’, negligence, impaired existence, assessing damage * Professor Bell would like to express appreciation to the National Endowment for the Humanites for affording her the opportunity at an NEH Summer Seminar to do most of the background work for the preparation of this manuscript, and to the South Carolina Committee for the Humanities for funding that aided in continued work on this topic. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)